There are a variety of door configurations that are used for cabinets. These include overlay doors that are mounted on the face of the cabinet, offset doors which have a portion of the door's thickness contoured to fit into the opening covered by the door, and inset doors where the door lies within the opening that it serves to close.
For cabinets that are fabricated off site and are installed in the field it is preferred that the doors can be installed on site and that the hinge can readily be attached to the door and accommodate adjustment of the doors during installation. This adjustability of the door is needed since the cabinets are tied into walls and floors during the installation and they frequently do not remain square. For the overlay and the offset doors the hinge of U.S. Pat. No. 3,590,419 provides a full range of adjustment by providing slots in the face of the cabinet and the side of the door which allow for adjustment of the door relative to the opening it covers. The slots allow for translational and rotational adjustment in the planes of the slots. The '419 patent provides five degrees of freedom for adjustment when two orthogonal slots are provided. However, the use of a double slot hinge requires a massive hinge and disrupts the face of the cabinet which detracts from the appearance of cabinets with inset doors. This problem has been overcome in part by the teaching of the '419 patent by employing a fixed hinge wing which attaches to the face of the cabinet.
This solution while reducing the mass of the hinge on the face of the cabinet results in a reduction in the degrees of freedom for adjusting the door relative to the door opening. The additional translational and rotational degrees normal to the door opening are lost. Thus if during the course of installation of a cabinet the face of the cabinet warps or the door warps there is no means to compensate for such warpage except by shimming the cabinet wing. The problem of the loss of degrees of freedom becomes more critical in the case of the inset doors since these doors are designed to lie in the plane of the cabinet face and miss-alignment will be apparent.
Furthermore the hinge of the '419 patent face mounts and thus does not provide means for concealing the cabinet wing when an inset door is employed.
Thus there is a need for a hinge for inset doors which are concealed when the doors are closed. The hinge should also be readily field mounted and provide for adjustment such that the door can readily be centered in the door openings.